Adapting Wagner’s Siegfried: Making Music Visible at the Metropolitan Opera

Abstract

Based on rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera/Ex Machina co-production of Siegfried in October 2011, this chapter interrogates how Robert Lepage adapted Wagner’s third Ring instalment through scenography—the dialogic interplay of the bodies, objects and physical medias employed on stage—rather than shifts to the libretto or score. Lepage’s work is positioned as a development of Wagner and Appia’s prescribed Ring aesthetics, which were largely incompatible with the prevailing standards of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera production. This re-envisioning of Siegfried is also positioned as an adaptation that subverts aspects of the opera’s potentially problematic politics of representation through its evocative visual performance text.

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